Just how valuable is your favourite music to advertisers and film makers? The sync business is worth billions. The power to earn from it might just be priceless.
Music in entertainment, marketing and advertising is the connective tissue between what we see, as consumer audiences, and what we feel. It is the visceral tone that sets our hearts and minds onto a particular, purposeful experience. The process literally syncs our minds to a message.
There is a psychological effect to hearing a familiar song in new circumstances that makes it one of the most powerful tools within the art of persuasion.
The Mere Exposure Effect is a psychological trigger from repeated exposure to a stimulus that leads to a preference for it. The principle of cognitive fluency tells us that familiar inputs are processed more easily by our brains, which interprets this ease as a sign of safety and truth.
Neuroscientists know that music affects the limbic system (including the amygdala and hippocampus), which governs emotion and memory. Familiar music can rapidly induce positive mood states, even subconsciously. Those sounds create a sense of safety, comfort and trust, reducing resistance to the message being delivered alongside it. Pairing music already associated with positive experiences (i.e., youth, first love, family gatherings) helps to transfer those emotions onto a new character or a new product.
Film-makers and marketing experts know that familiar sound-tracks evoke emotional memories, which can align an audience with a particular message. Advertisers often regionalise or demographically tune music choices to match the target audience’s cultural or generational touchpoints.
In effect, music is how producers, politicians and advertisers hack our brains.
It’s a trick worth tens of billions of dollars a year, if one has the right to use it.
Copyright
The only legal means to generate money from creative works, such as music, is by holding a contractual license to do so. The songwriters and performers earn their living from this right, taking royalties by licensing out their copyrights to publishers and record-labels who use that license to charge audiences money to listen to it.
A popular song holds its value for those publishers, labels and artists as audiences grow more familiar and come back to the music again, and again.
“If music in media is the brain hack behind Hollywood’s commercial success, then sync rights are the key to unlocking that success for everyone.”
The music in media segment of the entertainment industry takes that music and matches it to a film’s script, a TV show’s episode(s) or an advertisement campaign. The special license to couple music to visual images is called a right to synchronisation, or a sync right, and allows a producer or a brand to use it for that ever-important brain hack.
The Multi-Billion-Dollar Power of Music in Media
The Netflix hit, Stranger Things, Apple Inc.’s most iconic ads and America’s Super Bowl commercials all have one thing in common. You know what it is, even if it hasn’t been obvious to everyone all along. The right song can turn a moment into a movement, a campaign into culture and a soundtrack into box office gold.
In fact, Hollywood has been harnessing the power of song from the beginning. Even silent movies relied upon music to capture the audience. With a little marketing misdirect, the talkies transformed Hollywood’s studios and their broadcast cousins into some of the most lucrative corporate conglomerates on the planet. But it was the musical scores, the cues and the theme songs that memorialised motion pictures and television series alike into the hearts and minds of consumer audiences everywhere.
You may also like this article.
The Insanely Lucrative Ownership of Intangible Matter
This year alone, media executives and corporate shareholders will feast on the leftovers of more than US$2.5 trillion in annual revenues from a product literally willed into existence.
Music, as it turns out, has been Hollywood’s secret weapon for over a century. The digital era, however, has disrupted Hollywood. Now, music is finally ready to stop playing second-fiddle and is taking its rightful position as the true power behind the US$2.7 trillion in annual global revenues to the Media & Entertainment industry.
According to a comprehensive study from Will Page, former Chief Economist for Spotify and the UK collection society PRS for Music, music copyrights generated US$45.5 billion in global revenues in 2023. As reported in Music Business Worldwide, “With global box office revenues coming in at [US]$33.2 billion in 2023, music copyright is now worth 38% more than the cinema business – a complete reversal from just four years earlier.”
Continue Reading
Explore Media & Entertainment further:
For related articles, visit The Business‘ pillar page.
For the full picture, visit Our Industry page.
Thomas is our founder, acting Publisher and contributes an outsized proportion of our articles and editorial pieces.
He is an American lawyer & private equity specialist with 30+ years of international experience in investment strategy. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both adviser and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-investment companies. He is also founder of Coherent Media Group, a corporate holding company dedicated to media & entertainment businesses globally.
In his spare time, Thomas is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels.
